Quality of Care in Dermatology

WHY A theme issue on quality of care? Most dermatologists probably believe that the quality of our care has never been better. The problem is thatwe now have to provewhat before we may have accepted on faith. To do that, we must agree on what quality is and we must measure it accurately.1 Ironically, many physicians are ambivalent about the current preoccupation with measuring quality of care. In the past, simply the implicit commitment of each physician to try to choose the best care for each patient seemed sufficient. Now we not only must answer in more formal and public ways about our care but also our answers must include precise gauges of what we had heretofore assumed was part of the art of medicine (and which, like all art, defies measurement). What has happened, of course, is that decision making in health care has become more